Baroness Madeleine Deslandes

WE SAW some elephants, monkeys and seals in the morning, then a soldier or two wandering along St Kilda Road in the afternoon (being Anzac Day), and went screaming down dark and winding water tunnels at the pool in Albert Park. But the highlight of the day was seeing this beautiful picture for the first time in the flesh. Baroness Madeleine Deslandes was a French aristocrat who admired Burne-Jones and visited him at his home called the 'Grange' in Fulham, London in late 1895.  She was a writer of romantic fiction who established a Parisian artistic and literary salon. The portrait was the result of a rare and important commission, coming at a time late in Burne-Jones' life in which he was gaining many admirers from the Continent.

The wealthy Frenchwoman is wearing a dress of a beautiful deep blue and the inky black background compliments it well. She looks vague, distant and cerebral, as well as cool and sophisticated. She cradles a crystal ball in her lap which adds a mysterious dimension of something akin to clairvoyancy. I found the little reflective squares on the ball beautiful as well as her buttoned sleeves and the simple bows on her dress. Her fingers are smooth and slender. I imagine she would have appreciated the dreamy, mysterious quality of the painting which Burne-Jones achieved after several sittings. It's fabulous to see beautiful pictures in the flesh like this.

Cold Chisel - Cheap Wine (1980)

THE GUARDIAN, in its music section, had a really nice tribute to Cold Chisel recently, including an original clip of 'Cheap Wine.' I always liked the band, and the song, when I was growing up, but I wasn't crazy about it like some people, and even then I preferred to listen to The Doors and The Beatles, etc. But seeing the film clip again I found it quite charming and a little bit mesmerizing, appreciating it more this time. The article talks about how Cold Chisel were more than just a pub band- articulate songs and songs that were about meaningful things. So I played the clip a few times the other day, not remembering having seen it before. And then, today, I heard it on the bus, drifting in and out, battling with the bus chatter and the sounds of the gears. And it's been in my head all morning. And, appearing in The Guardian, I wonder if it is revolving around in the mind of some English chap or English gal as they cross busy Piccadilly Circus or even David Cameron as he is driven down Whitehall on his way to 10 Downing Street, or the Queen, tinkering with her jewellery, inside Buckingham Palace, Nick Cave sitting in his studio at his piano in Hove near Brighton, Mike Leigh planning and plotting in his favorite cafe in Soho, the proprietor of the fabulous Ulysses bookshop thumbing his way through a first edition of Mrs Dalloway in Museum Street in London, a dancer flexing her muscles inside the Royal Ballet school in Covent Garden, etc, I could go on doing this forever.

The Guardian, April 6, by Russell Cunningham (edited):

Cold Chisel started out as pub rockers, but that workaday sobriquet sells them short – they're no small beer. Formidable and, at least as younger men, volatile on stage, their reputation was also forged with articulate songs touching on charged issues such as abortion and civil strife, and delivered with whip snare, searing guitar and soaring voice. They've filled arenas, not just bars, so by all means call them rockers, hard rockers even, but "pub rockers" plays them down.
They were formed in Adelaide in 1973 but by 1977 their stomping ground was Sydney. The city's streets, particularly Kings Cross and the inner east, bled into the lyrics of laureate keyboardist Don Walker and portrayed a band not so much of the land as the asphalt. This sense of place in their songs made Cold Chisel seem knowable and worth knowing. To the suburban youth who revered them they were like mates, hitting the town with you on a Saturday night and knowing where to lose the hangover on Sunday morning, and in their strident fashion showed many a disaffected teenager it was OK to rail at the world so long as you could laugh at it, too.


I remember buying Chisel albums with uncool glee. I remember cradling home their third, East, in 1980 and unleashing its bonfire blues on my parents' sitting-room stereo. It's a compelling album, raw but deceptively well reined, with Cheap Wine the toast of 12 fizzing tracks. East spent a year in the Australian charts and was the only Chisel album to enter the US Billboard 200, even though a superior studio effort followed with Circus Animals two years later.



   The cover of EAST, June 1980
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A SORDID PHASE

I MUST be going through a bit of a sordid or subversive phase- maybe too much time on my hands. Amidst doing things like creating a birthday book full of lovely, innocent images, and reading about how fiction works, and having a nice, carefree time in Bendigo in the sunshine, and trawling the magnificent LaTrobe University library like the old days, I have been reading and watching these nasty pieces of fiction and non-fiction, mostly about complex subterranean desires. First there were the films SHAME and WOLF CREEK, and then Micheal Haneke's HIDDEN, all exploring complex notions of destruction and desire, now I have recently watched the recent Australian film SNOWTOWN, another Haneke film, THE PIANO TEACHER, and a factual study of the recent manslaughter of a local multi-millionaire businessman.


SNOWTOWN was gripping, at times brilliant, but often uncofortable viewing. A much more complex film than WOLF CREEK, it explores further the pysche of an Adelaide man's unquenchable desire to inflict pain and murder on what he ses as the degenerates of society, especially homosexuals and paedophiles. The violence was graphic and a bit nauseating. In cinemas some people walked out- perhaps partly because of the 'true nature' of the events that were being shown- the notorious bodies-in-the-barrel 'Snowtown murders' of a few years ago. The violence left me a bit shaken as well, especially a bathroom sequence- I walked around the house feeling like I was covered in some sort of awful grime- but this is not what I am applauding the film for. I am applauding the film for its incredible central performance of Daniel Henshall playing John Bunting. At first a very likeable, seemingly generous chap who ensures the poor kids in the dysfunctional family are fed well and looked after, something that is desperately needed in such a sordid and squalid town. Lucas Pittaway is also very good, playing the 17 year old kid, Jamie Vlassakis, whose mind is numb most of the time and whose expression is usually blank, until it breaks occasionally into torment and pain as he witnesses the horrors that Bunting unleashes around him. The cinematography and the dialogue are exceptional, particularly in one scene that takes place in the kitchen, with the gathered mob talking about what they should do to the local degenerates, considering the police seem disinterested or ineffectual. The film has a mesmerizing feel about it and is not easily forgotten.




I found THE PIANO TEACHER to be less interesting, although undoubtedly it is a very well-made and brave film. Isabelle Huppert plays Erika Kohut, a bizarre woman who teaches music and is a target of obsession of one of her impressionistic students. She is emotionally very complex and the student who pursues her can not have predicted what he was in stall for when he encourages her advances. The poster sums up a lot of the feel of the film, depicting a stark photo of little colour of the teacher and her student locked into a strong sexual embrace on the floor of the women's toilets. There is a shocking scene of genital mutilation that is reminiscent of Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and a number of scenes of what most people would classify as bizarre sexual behavior in a peep show, at the drive-in, and even with Kohut in bed with her mother. Haneke loves extremities and I admire the four films of his that I've seen. But I found this one depressing, emotionally uninvolving and less memorable than the others.

                                     

The non-fiction book that I read is called THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HERMAN ROCKEFELLER by Hilary Bonning. If you google 'herman rockefeller' you will discover the whole sorded story. What compelled a multi-millionaire to travel to Hadfield in Melbourne's north-west to have sex on a mattress with Bernadette Denny is anyone's guess, and one of life's mysteries. The book is an intriguing read for this reason, and also for the discovery of how the police glean facts in order to find the ansers to things. The police interviews of Denny and her boyfriend Mario Schembri are very telling, and there is also quite a lot of time devoted to the court appearances, and Rockefeller's amazingly stoic wife. We don't find out exactly how Rockefeller died, beyond being bashed by both Denny and Schembri in their garage in South Street. But the disposal of the body makes interesting reading. This was not a planned 'murder' by any means. The two accomplices must have received the fright of their life when they say it was who they had been dealing with on the news stations every night for a week. Schembri didn't hide Rockefeller's hybrid car very well. When it was found a GPS expert brought in by the police could tell them that the last address punched in was 125 South Street Hadfield! Easy detective work. The suburbs are full of strange occurences. I am about to teach the film LANTANA again.

Metaphors and other ideas in James Wood's 'How Fiction Works.'

JOHN Banville, on the inside cover of 'How Fiction Works' (2008), says that James Wood  is 'one of the finest critics at work today.' To get the most out of this book it would be essential to have a vast literary  background encompassing works of Flaubert, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Stendhal, Balzac, Conrad (and in more recent times), Waugh, Nabakov, Naipaul, Pynchon and Roth. All of which I either don't have, or do have, fleetingly, due to too many hours when I was younger watching television and football, and in latter years being married, working, and having children. Still there was plenty to interest me, with my fleeting understanding of works by a number of these authors. And I took solace with the beautiful references to Lawrence, Hardy, Woolf, Forster, Mansfield and others that I could easily grapple with.

My favourite sections of this book were the references to metaphor which Wood identifies as among his favourites in a vast body of reading. This includes reference to a newspaper article in the US in which he discovered NYC garbage collectors call maggots in trash cans 'disco rice.' A metaphor that after three weeks hasn't left me.

In an early discussion of metaphor, Wood makes a well known reference to King Lear- the passage in which the hideous Cornwall rips out Gloucester's eyeball, calling it a 'vile jelly', his way I suppose of dehumanising Gloucester to make the repulsive act easier to perform.

Wood seems mesmerized by a simple phrase Virginia Woolf uses in her novel The Waves: 'The day waves yellow with all its crops.' For him, the unusual phrase 'waves yellow' conveys the sense that 'yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too...the sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of our will.' I read- some of- The Waves several years ago and found it a very strange book. I think it's fantastic that eight words strung together in unusual phrasing can move him so much, as it shows what impact great and inventive language can have.

Wood enjoys Lawrence as well and he makes reference to Sea and Sardinia, one of Lawrence's great travel books. Lawrence refers to King Victor Emanuel as having 'little short legs.' As Wood points out, technically there is no sense in having 'little' and 'short' grouped together like this. But together they create an interesting, farcical  effect. 'Little short legs', says Wood is better than 'short little legs' 'because it is jumpier..more absurd, forcing us to stumble slightly...over the unexpected rhythm.' It is absolutely true, though I would never have picked this up on my own.

In a perhaps similar way, Jane Austen is referenced via her novel Emma. Mrs Elton is picking strawberries, and is described as dressed in 'all her appartus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket.' Wood points out that there is a clash between the 'scientific register' of apparatus and the words 'of happiness'- he says it soundsm ore like 'an inverted torture machine than a bonnet or basket'- the point being that it reflects Mrs Elton's character in some way, her 'doggedness' or 'persistence' somehow. Again, a great example of a particular kind of advanced and interesting thinking.

Wood explores metaphors again near the end of his book when he writes ravishingly about Lawrence in Sea and Sardinia one more time - a fire in a grate has become 'that rushing bouquet of new flames in the grate'- so the unusual pairing of fire with flowers (bouquet), flames can rush, flowers cannot, and 'new flames' as Wood suggests, making a sudden third metaphor in the same small grouping of words.

Wood finds further unusual fire metaphors- from Hardy in Far From the Madding Crowd comes 'a scarlet handful of fire'- as opposed to dust, which is much more common- and Saul Bellow has 'The blue flames fluttered like a school of fishes in the coal fire'- the school of fishes perfectly capturing that idea of flickering and moving about.

A final, lovely example of metaphor I liked comes from Virginia Woolf's beautiful story To The Lighthouse. As Mrs Ramsay says goodnight to her children, she carefully closes the bedroom door, and lets 'the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock.' Wood appreciates the effect of the verb 'lengthen' which lengthens the sentence to reinforce the 'slowly' part which reinforces the need to make sure she doesn't awaken the children.

There are many other great things in this book, but as usual I only have to time to reflect on a snapshot as work, family, marriage all serve to take me back to the less imaginary world.

FIRST TERM OF PREP 2012 – a parent’s perspective.

LEAVES on the trees tremble. Birds are starting to chirp away up high. A vague dusky kind of light settles over the suburbs. It’s too early. I don’t usually leave the house at a quarter past seven in the morning- I have never had to take somebody to before-school care in the past , either.


This year my eldest daughter has started Prep, and as I take her to school- or rather, she takes me, bounding along on her bike- I feel incredibly proud and grown up and important. The whole of the busy street can see me as I stroll behind her, holding my work bag in my right hand, and carrying her heavy purple backpack over my left shoulder. I’ve seen these fathers’ before and not taken much notice. But now I can see how it makes you feel special and good inside.


S didn’t want to think about Prep in the holidays. So we didn’t push it. It wasn’t until there was about a week to go that I said to my wife ‘we have to start talking about school or it will come as too much of a shock to her.’ There were some concerns at kindergarten. Quite a few uncertainties about where she belonged. So we made a point of bringing it up in as positive a fashion as possible during the remaining week of the holidays. “I can’t believe you are about to start school. You will have such a great time and meet so many new friends.”


The first few days, even the first couple of weeks, shocked us. It was a much smoother transition than we could have hoped for. Not everything was perfect at school, but she liked the teacher, there were some kids to play with, and the ‘buddy’ was warm and generous with her time. In fact during the majority of the whole of the first term S has pretty much enjoyed school. We can tell because she wants to talk about it- most nights- even if her stock answer to ‘how was your day?’ is initially always ‘ok.’


It hasn’t been a walk in the park in every aspect, however. I work full time and my wife works Mondays and Tuesdays. Before school care and after school care on those days has been difficult. The regular pattern has begun with a sleepless night on the Sunday. Tears and more tears after that. Is she seeing if sobbing and a distressed face might change her parents’ mind? Sleep doesn’t come until around 9:00 PM on those nights. And then there’s the next morning. An anguished “I DON’T WANNA GO TO BEFORE AND AFTER SCHOOL CARE!” reverberates around the hall. Grandma drags a reluctant child, but she gets there eventually. Even if her day goes ok, there is a repeat of this on the Monday night and then the Tuesday morning the next day.


This is where I come into it, the apprehensive father. Last Tuesday morning was a good example. Mother had already left and S was anxious the moment she woke up. The pain on her face suggested that ‘doll doll’ had accidentally been thrown out in the rubbish. The clashing of steel and rubbish bins outside was not enough to drown out her miserable cries.


Somehow she managed to get herself dressed but she didn’t eat a thing. I put the preventative ‘nit spray’ in her hair, gathered her backpack, and we were out the door far too early. Walking down Bruce Street, me lumbering a long way behind the back of her bike, S suddenly gets off her bike and says ‘Daddy, I think I’m going to vomit. I have pains in my tummy.” We sit on a kerb for a bit, thoughts of the consequences of going back home flooding through my mind. A few minutes later, thankfully, we are back on our way. By this time, however, along with all the other heavy things, I am now wheeling her bike.


Upon entering the makeshift kitchen area of the school, the lovely women carers take one look at her face, and launch into a repair job, wild excitement about the hour ahead in their voice. Poor S is cynical and doubtful, and worse still, the journey has taken so long that her father has to immediately leave. The air outside is fresh and invigorating. Miraculously, when her mother picks her up at the end of after-school care at the end of the day, she is kind of smiling and not quite ready to leave yet.


Not every day is like this, however. Sometimes those non before-school and after-school days aren’t too bad. One night recently she told me when I got home ‘I smiled at some of the kids today, Daddy.’ I have been teaching her a mantra: ‘make sure you remember to smile and be friendly.’


On some occasions that journey to school on a Tuesday morning has been the highlight of my week. It was the first couple of times when I felt the most proud. She is bounding ahead, the purple streamers streaming out at right angles from her handlebars in the wind. Her purple-uniformed back is arching as she is striving along Bruce Street enjoying the morning ride, eager to show her father her new surroundings. I am walking behind her, watching her, absolutely enjoying this new experience of following my beautiful purple clad daughter. Now I know what it feels like to be the father of a child at school.


Now there’s only a week to go and the first term of her school life is about to draw to a close. And now we have another reason to be proud. She found out today that she has become the nominated rep for her Prep grade’s SRC.

                  

SOLACE: An Irish First Novel

           
I READ SOLACE these past days and found myself  reasonably involved, but all the time thinking about its flaws, its self-conscious style, the way that it smacks of first novel writing. I love the writing of authors like Zoe Heller, M J Hyland and Colm Toibin, but in every case their first book was flawed and didn't fully hint at the great writers they would become. Perhaps it will be this way with Belinda McKeon and following this one will be something as good as Notes on a Scandal, The Heather Blazing or Carry Me Down. Mmmm, I'm not sure.

The author is writing about contemporary Ireland, the Ireland in which the economy is or has gone down the tube and property prices have fallen away. Mark (like the author), has grown up on a farm in Co. Longford (apparently the most depressed county in the whole of Ireland) and has emotional ties with his parents, who are subtly hinting at wanting him to be at home helping them run the farm, which is difficult because Mark also needs to be near his university in Dublin working on his thesis, and after meeting a lawyer named Joanne Lynch wanting to be with her. An unexpected baby ensues, followed by a family tragedy. Mark's friends, including a loyal guy named Mossy, are not very convincingly sketched. The details of Mark's thesis, about a local writer of some note, crop up a lot and are fairly dull. Joanne is working on a case about family disintegration that is reasonably interesting because it involves some workplace bullying. The tragedy is sad and interesting, but the full emotional impact is lost because the writer has decided to jump past it and refer to it only as a slightly hazy past event.

Still, there are some really interesting ideas in Solace. I found the sense of responsibility Mark feels in being young and caught out as the sole parent of a young child beautifully realised. He is in the library trying to find books and time has escaped him and suddenly five minutes with the gracious librarian has turned into an hour with the now gruff librarian minding for too long a wilful kid.  The child is called Aoife and is lovely but wild, a bit like that other wild single parent child, Pearl, in The Scarlet Letter.

McKeon also provides excellent insight into ageing, specifically Mark's slowly fading farmer father, out toiling at the Longord farm, and constantly texting and calling Mark for reassurance because, like the widower in Les Murray's The Widower in the Country, he is lost with the sudden death of his wife. He has inexplicably bought two expensive tractors and his confidence and self assurance of yesteryear has now deserted him.

Perhaps the author knows a thing or two about babies or small children, and ageing fathers, and even sudden loss. And certainly farms. The details about farm life are thoroughly convincing, as are the insights into the mindest of those who live in small farming communities. But it is the young, urban bar life, and the reckless university days that are less convincingly drawn, and the thesis that preoccupies Mark, as well as Joanne's dreary lawyer life.

Shame: An Unhealthy Obsession

I FOUND Steve McQueen's 'HUNGER' to be such an interesting, powerfully made film, starring a man of considerable charisma, Michael Fassbender, so naturally I wanted to see their next collaboration. We all know about Bobby Sands' compelling obsession, an obsession that ultimately killed him. This time Fassbender has created another obsessive character by the name of Brandon whose obsession happens to be sex. He cannot function, it seems, without it. There are some absorbing scenes that are clearly a trademark of McQueen's directoral style. As with 'Hunger', we have long, extended shots without editing that seem so natural and remarkable.

The best example I can think of is when a pent-up Brandon is running across a huge expanse of New York City's streets, finally ending up at a street that has Madison Square Garden around the corner. The camera is on the other side of the road as he races along, with each intersection magically clear of traffic so he doesn't have to slow down. A good deal of elaborate reconnisance must have gone into this one.

Another beautiful extended shot that goes for several minutes is when the camera rests upon Brandon's sister's face- Sissy- as she sings a moving endition of 'New York, New York' in an expensive-looking bar. Her face is compelling and her emotions are turbulent as she sings the song so slowly and so seductively. I waited for the credits to discover that it really is Carey Mulligan's voice over the soundtrack.

My other favourite shots in the film include a chance encounter between Brandon and a beautiful woman whilst they are travelling on the subway. He can't take his eyes from her and she boldly returns his stare; a bedroom scene of passion bathed in a lovely, golden light; and unusual shots of Brandon and his sister talking on the couch, with the camera behind their heads so we can only glimpse their expressions from time to time in profile (see below):



I didn't enjoy 'Shame' as much as 'Hunger', probably because the subject matter interested me less. But it was worth seeing for the creative ideas of the director and the compelling acting. The ending of the film shows us just how ultimately dangerous and unfulfilling obsessions of any kind will become.